Monthly Archives: August 2016

The competition to be king of the social media hill is hotter than ever, and Facebook cannot coast just because it’s on top. Snapchat and Twitter are making changes regularly to try to woo users to their platforms. In order to stay on top, therefore, Facebook needs to constantly innovate. Read more:

So you’ve written a book and you want to get it out into the world. You’ve decided that self-publishing is the way to go, but you’re not really sure how to turn that book on your computer into something that can be read by an eager public.Read more

I’m always available to answer questions for you because it may be the questions millions of other authors are trying to get answer and the answer we come up with could help not only you, but others as well.

From Matt Banner.

As writers, all we want to do is practice our craft in peace, but there’s more to being an author than simply pumping out new books left and right. We need to engage with our readers and produce content for them to read between major releases. A blog is the perfect place to do just that.

Today I’ll show you how to start a website you can use for your promotion and for engaging your readers. Then we’ll take a look at an infographic designed to give you new and exciting information and tools to help elevate your writing to new heights!

With all the free writing flooding the internet, it’s harder to stand out. Even if someone downloads your free eBook, your fiction is competing with all the other stories on that person’s digital reader.

Given the ubiquity of free, it’s reasonable to question whether the market is saturated, thus reducing the effectiveness. I, on the other hand, believe free still works.

It’s difficult to pack a library on a motorcycle, even with a sidecar.

Though I love print books I’m so often on the road that it’s more efficient to use my Kindle Paperwhite as a personal portable library for work and for pleasure. Authors send me advance reader copies (ARCs) for blurbs or review and books for possible publication with Misadventures Media. I wish they’d send me a MOBI file but, though it’s easy enough to do, they don’t even know where to start. So I ask for a Word doc and create it myself in about 15 minutes. Sometimes I put it off, though, and forget. So, no blurb. Sorry!

Please don’t put your potential reviewers in that position. It’s actually pretty easy to make your own EPUB and MOBI files using the free Calibre eBook conversion and management tool. It should take you about an h

In my years as an Indie publisher, there have been a number of schools of thought as to what it took to be successful. In the salad days of 2012, the advice was, “Do a free run, then sit down and wait for the Brinks truck to back up with your money.” Those were good days, almost certainly too good to last. Since then, the advice has ranged from “write in a series and make the first book free” to “drive sales through Facebook ads,” to “use keywords and sharpened metadata to drive traffic.” Through it all, though, one thing has been constant: you need a mailing list.

The reason why is simple: You control how and when you access a mailing list, as opposed to investing everything into working the Amazon or social media algorithms. The problem with algorithms is, they change. What might be golden today can turn to lead tomorrow. A mailing list is yours forever, though, or at least until someone unsubscribes.

The key frustration I hear from most writers, though, is that it is awfully difficult to build a list into any kind of size that will deliver results. I feel your pain. Let’s look at the various ways to build a mailing list. Read more of this post